New Photos App Detects 4,432 Total Searchable Objects and 7 Facial Expressions [Updated]

One of Apple's first party apps that's getting a makeover in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra is Photos, bringing intensive new facial recognition and "Siri intelligence" features to the picture accumulating app. Over the weekend, a Reddit user discovered a few lines of code within the framework of Apple's beta of the macOS Sierra Photos app, possibly detailing both the specific facial expressions that the app recognizes and every single searchable object users can find in both Sierra and iOS 10.

In a more detailed Medium post, Redditor vista980622 explained that Photos will be able to "recognize and distinguish" 7 total facial expressions after the app scans a user's library and forms a "faceprint" for each individual in a picture. The expressions include greedy, disgust, neutral, scream, smiling, surprise, and suspicious.


One of the biggest new additions to Photos in iOS 10 and Sierra is "Memories," a new tab that aggregates a user's pictures into logical, organized folders based on the app's new facial and object recognition abilities. vista980622 discovered every category of Memories as well, whose names are said to be "automatically generated using metadata from the photos and tags from analysis of photos."

The category names are as follows:

Memories from areas of interest, Best of past memories, Memories that break out of routine, Celebration in history, Contextual memories, Crowd, Day in history, Holiday in history, Location of interest, Nearby, New contextual memories, New memories, Person’s Birthdays, Person’s memories, Recent events (calendar, crowd, holiday, people, person, social, trip, weekend), Region of interest, Social group memories, Sometime memories, Special memories, Favourited, Trips, Week in history, Weekend, Year summary, Last week, Last Weekend

Users who have been testing the first beta of iOS 10 last week mentioned the impressive search parameters of Photos, which intelligently detects and tags every picture for the scenes, objects, and landmarks captured within. In totality, there are 432 of these items that can be searched for by the user, including everyday phrases like "Apartment" and "Birthday Cake," and somewhat obscure inquiries like "Diadem" and "Gastropod."

Additionally, you can search for various landmarks. For example, Photos can respond for search query of “Maho” (beach in Saint Martin), despite Photos is not programmed or trained to understand specific landmarks. Behind the scenes, Photos app first generates a generic categorization for the scene, “beach”, then searches through a built-in dictionary for all landmarks that has the name “beach” in its definition. Therefore, cleverly, despite Photos app knows nothing about “Maho” in particular, it is still able to return the right results. The same applies to nature scenes, water scenes and urban scenes.

The full list of 432 searchable objects and scenes can be found in the Medium post shared on Reddit. As discovered within the first beta of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, the comprehensive list is far from confirmed as accurate. All the same, many of its terms do match up with another Redditor's successfully executed searches, as well as the words they claimed failed to generate any concrete results.

Previous Coverage: See iOS 10's New Photos App in Action

Update: The list of searchable scenes and objects appears to account for around 4,432 items, as opposed to the 432 mentioned in this article and the original Medium post. It's unclear whether vista980622 made a typo in the blog post, or if groups of scenes and items -- like Art, Artistic Creation, Artistic Creations, Artistries, Artistry, Arts, Artwork, Artworks -- were grouped together to result in a smaller number.

Update 2: The author of the Medium post has acknowledged that the originally quoted 432 scenes and objects was a typo and the correct number should indeed be 4,432.